5/1/2000

Moving monuments
to preserve history

Property owners, volunteers devote time to forgotten cemeteries

By Jennifer Thomas
Palatka Daily News


EAST PALATKA - A group of volunteers and some property owners spent Saturday erecting monuments that were moved from the historic Braddock Cemetery in South Putnam County to one in East Palatka off McCormick Road.
Mary E. Murphy-Hoffmann, 47, said the monuments were discovered when the Braddock Cemetery, located off of Denver road south of Crescent City, was undergoing clean up and restoration in 1997.


The headstones are for eight members of the Mays family, and were originally in a second historic cemetery, located between Orange Mills and Buena Vista near the St. Johns River.


Murphy-Hoffmann, a librarian at Putnam Correctional Institution, believes the headstones were wrongfully transported in the 1970s from the Mays Cemetery when the property was sold and subdivided, but is unable to prove it.
She said the stones were removed, but believes the remains of the bodies are still located in the cemetery. Traces of the burial site have been removed with the exception of some fragments of stone monuments, she said.


Murphy-Hoffmann and her husband Lynn Hoffmann, a 56-year-old computer consultant and software instructor, own St. John the Evangelist Cemetery, established in East Palatka in 1881. They agreed to temporarily set up the monuments in their cemetery.


"This is interim. At least here, they can be put up and displayed in a respectful manner," she said.


Murphy-Hoffmann hopes the stones will one day be restored to the Mays Cemetery, which was established in 1832, and is located nine miles from where they are being stored.


The couple received assistance from the Florida Confederation for the Preservation of Historic Sites, which donated equipment, materials and time to the East Palatka project.


"They're primarily interested in the Civil War and anything to do with the Civil War," Murphy-Hoffmann said, referring to the Confederation, based in Daytona Beach. "They were involved with the Braddock Cemetery.


One of the questions was what to do with the Mays stones."


Murphy-Hoffmann's family heritage is connected to both the Mays and St. John the Evangelist cemeteries. Her great-grandmother's first husband, Eugene McCallum, and a stillborn child, were buried in the Mays site. Murphy-Hoffmann's great-grandmother, a native of Ireland, Ellen Fitzpatrick McCallum Hazel, later remarried. Her second husband, John Bland Hazel, is Murphy-Hoffmann's great-grandfather. Both bodies were later moved near the couple's home, Edgefield-on-the St. Johns, and eventually St. John the Evangelist.


Murphy-Hoffmann said the Mays Cemetery had been established by Dr. R.G. Mays , A.S. Simpkins and Archibald Cole, who relocated to the area from South Carolina in the 1830s.


According to information provided by Murphy-Hoffmann, the owners originally had orange groves until the freeze of 1835 killed the crop, and they began mills for which Orange Mills is named.


Mays and his wife survived three daughters, who were buried in the Orange Mills cemetery. The Mays relocated to Georgia and were buried there. Headstones that were erected last weekend included: the Mays' daughters, Annie L. Lamar Mays Cole, Feb. 18, 1827-March 7, 1871, and her husband, Archibald Hamblin Cole, 1879, child, Archie Woolridge Cole, who was one year and eight months old, Elizabeth Nancy Mays Simkins, April 1, 1829-Sept. 30, 1862, and Sarah Stark Mays Call, Dec. 10,1833-Oct. 10, 1858.


Three other people who were buried at the Mays site are Lydia Naugain Cowgill, May 29, 1825-Nov. 17, 1871, Lucy Lee Call, Feb. 13,1856-Jan. 12, 1859 and Sarah Mays Call, July 6, 1854-Feb. 16, 1871.


Hazel, a Civil War veteran, was a member of the St. John the Evangelist mission church, situated across McCormick Road from where the cemetery of the same namesake is currently located.


Members had attempted to bury one deceased parishioner on church grounds, but found that the water table was too high. Murphy-Hoffmann said her great-grandfather suggested establishing a cemetery across the street where an orange grove had been planted to help with upkeep of the church.


"There's five acres here for the cemetery. There are a great many unmarked graves here," she said, pointing out depressions in the landscape.


Murphy-Hoffmann and her husband spent four years negotiating with the St. Augustine Catholic Diocese, which owned the property, before they received a quit-claim deed for one and a quarter acres in the cemetery.


She said a backer, who had originally agreed to relocate the church building across the road to the cemetery, but was lost during the period of the negotiations. The church, also established in 1881, is in disrepair.


The librarian plans to have a ceremony once the East Palatka cemetery project is finished, and will have a sign made and erected, which reads: "The Mays Cemetery Memorial, Est. 1832, stolen 1974."


"We're doing the best we can to right a grievous wrong," Murphy-Hoffmann said.
Volunteers who assisted with the work are Confederation secretary and board of directors member Bill Blair of DeLand, second vice president and board member Richard Jones of Ormond Beach, board member Dinah Jones of Ormond Beach and board member Gerald Leblanc of Sun City Center, Fla.
Adam Mengel, the City of Palatka's director of planning, and William Krueger, Putnam County operator/assistant emergency coordinator with the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, also volunteered to assist with the cemetery's clean up as part of Keep Putnam Beautiful.


Murphy-Hoffmann said she has maintained the cemetery with the assistance of family members at times. Her husband's mother, Marian Eileen Stewart Hoffmann Horcher was buried there April 1, 1999. Murphy-Hoffmann requested that the stone monument that is on her great-grandfather's grave because he was a military veteran. Hazel died in 1909.